Tuesday, March 17, 2015

No. 3 Alan Grant

Final Prog: not seen since Prog 1839, but hopefully he'll be back soon!

First Meg: 1

Final Meg: last seen with an Anderson tale from Meg 349, likely back with more Anderson, Dredd and who knows what else in due course.

Total appearances: 1681

-covering multiple
stories across hundreds of Progs, Judge Dredd Megs, StarLord, and various Annuals
and Specials from that stable, as well as crossovers with Batman and Lobo…

…but not counting the
287 scripts he co-wrote for the rather delicious Daily Star Judge Dredd comic
strip.

- Or the many stories
he has written for publications such as Eagle, Scream and Toxic!, that might be considered part of the 2000 AD
stable.

Co-Creator credits (all with John Wagner):

Ace Trucking Co,
Helltrekkers, Mean Team, Bad City Blue (I think), Durham Red, Middenface McNulty and a
large number of supporting players throughout the world of Judge Dredd and
Strontium Dog, including such enduring wonders as Orlok the Assassin and PJ
Maybe.

(not to mention The
Bogie Man and Bob the Galactic Bum, both reprinted in the Megazine)

Grant began his career
in as an assistant editor, from Progs 95-174. From interviews - and Grant is a famously candid and willing interview sibject - it’s known that
he put a ton of work into fiddling with Gerry Finley-Day’s scripts on the VCs, Rogue Trooper and most especially Harry 20 on the High Rock
(he might even deserve a cop-creator credit on those?), and that he
supplied key points of feedback and notes on the early Future Shock submissions
of one Alan Moore. Hard to measure a specific Prog count for this work (I’ve
simply added the whole range of 81 progs to his tally); not at all hard to
celebrate the good work achieved on helping deliver two classic space war stories
and on nurturing a top talent.*

Notable character creations:

Since Grant’s most
prolific spell as a writer for 2000 AD was in collaboration with John Wagner,
it’s not really possible to parse what sprang from the mind of Alan Grant alone.
But it seems fair to credit Grant with the enduring legacy of: Judge Anderson,
Orlok the Assassin, Middenface McNulty, to name but the three supporting
players who have gone on to enjoy their own solo strips under Grant’s solo pen.

Grant was, I assume, the key creator of Feral, who appeared in Strontium Dog after the point at which
the two stopped co-writing stories for 2000AD. I’m a big Feral fan (including
the Ennis/Hogan run), and saddened by Wagner’s dismissal of him in the recent
resurrection storyline.

Let’s also not forget
that Grant, with some help from Kelvin Gosnell, completely revamped the old
Tornado Blackhawk series into a space
opera. Sidekicks Zog and Ursa linger in the mind, and the villainous ‘soul
sucker’ was a neat idea, too.

Although Grant’s first work for 2000 AD was
as a solo writer – on a future shock, followed by a long stint writing fantasy
warrior Blackhawk - he really made
his mark as a writing partner to John Wagner. Together they tackled classic runs
– some might even dare to say, definitive
runs - of Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog and Sam Slade, RoboHunter (banging out Ace Trucking Co, the original Mean Team and about 2/3 of all scripts
for the entire run of the 1980s Eagle comic along the way…).

Legend has it that the two would hash out
scripts together in a cramped, musty shed with pen and paper (and perhaps the
odd recreational liquid), and that they’d take turns to type up the scripts to
send to their various editors.

This practice makes it nigh impossible to
see who is responsible for what in each collaboration, and I don’t suppose
either Wagner or Grant much care. The simple fact is that these jointly-written
stories were at least as good as, and very often better than, the scripts
either man ever wrote alone.

Art by Ian Gibson

I believe both writers have stated in
interviews that they had a jokes policy that operated such that both had to
laugh for a joke to be kept in. If only one found it funny, it was cut.
Whatever the truth, it’s a rare episode from their collaborations that doesn’t
have something in it to raise a smile – even amidst the bleakness of Strontium Dog: Rage there is humour salted
throughout.

Art by Carlos Ezquerra

Post-partnership, Grant’s solo work started
to appear (in 2000 AD), somewhere around Prog 600, in 1988. To my mind, he
chose to go in two different directions as a solo writer. Some of his work,
often in his Judge Dredd scripts, focused
on comedy, with a lot of satirical content aimed at the world of the time he
was writing. (This kind of thing has been a long tradition at 2000 AD, but it’s
exemplified best by another Grant effort, namely B.L.A.I.R. 1.**) But in his other work Grant often veered away from
comedy and took the opportunity to develop ideas he’d clearly recently enjoyed
reading about, especially in his Anderson:
Psi Division work. Luke Reinhart in ‘the
Random Man’; mythical eastern kingdoms in ‘Shamballa’; engrams in ‘Engram’…
you get the idea.

Grant expertly manages to present and play
around with these ideas without ever plagiarizing them, and is adept at poking
holes in some of the sillier aspects. To be honest, I’m often happiest when
Grant simply uses his encyclopedic knowledge to drop in casual intellectual
puns. “What’s the matter Heisenberg, ain’t ya got any principles?!?” being a
favourite example. (From Strontium Dog:
Incident at the end of the Universe)

Sometimes, Grant’s own intellect doesn’t
quite translate onto the page. Mazeworld,
one of the most beautifully-drawn strips in 2000 AD history, is so desperately
loaded with symbolism, so deliciously close to bringing the reader to a state
of epiphanic realization, that it’s crushing when the story somehow fails to
actually be about anything.***

For me, the best of Grant’s writing is in
his character work. I loved what he did with Johnny Alpha and Feral in the Final Solution, and it was a shame
he chose not to take that story further after the death of the main man. But,
beyond that and to the present day, it’s all about Psi-Division’s own Cassandra
Anderson.

There are essays to be written elsewhere,
by smarter people, about the deftness with which Grant ages****, matures and
keeps Anderson
as a believable person. She’s someone inherently good who is forced to
reconcile her day-to-day work as a Judge enforcing the law within a totalitarian
regime. She also tussles with psychic criminals on a regular basis, although I
have to say that this side of the strip has, to me, felt like an afterthought
ever since Grant began exploring Cassie’s inner thoughts.

And then there’s Dredd himself. The famous
irony at the heart of Judge Dredd,
(the series, not the character) is that we, the readers, are made to root for a
hero who is ultimately a tool of an evil society. Grant, it seems to me,
prefers to cast Dredd as a bastard, and pointedly not a hero – in contrast to Wagner, who plays him as a conflicted
hero most often. Grant is also keen on pitting Dredd against the more lunatic
fringe of Mega City society, making it tough to
sympathize with any of the character in his Dredd work, but for one-off stories, it’s all about
the jokes and the sympathy isn’t a big deal.

Art by Arthur Ranson

Compared to his Dredd, Grant’s Anderson is much more
obviously a character he likes to see the good in, and to show how much it
hurts her that she’s stuck in a twisted system – one she both sympathizes with and
one she hates.

Art by Arthur Ranson

He writes a mean Batman tale, too! (And, at long last, it seem that a bunch of it is going to be reprinted in the upcoming collection 'Legends of the Dark Knight: Norm Breyfogle'. About damn time!)

My
personal favourites:

Strontium Dog: incident on Mayger Minor; The
Rammy; The Final Solution

Judge Dredd: Monkey
Business at the Charles Darwin Block; Alone in a Crowd; Letter
from a Democrat; Paid with thanks; What if Judges did the Ads?; Bug; John
Cassevetes is dead…

(I’m not trying to
pretend that one author had more input than another on the co-written tales,
just continuing the joke from the Wagner entry that listing favourite Dredd
stories is an endless affair…)

*I’ve not been able to
locate a definitive statement on what, exactly, Alan Grant did with Gerry
Finley-Day’s scripts. Did he simply type up the (apparently somewhat illegible)
scripts and fix various spelling and grammar problems? Did he massage the
script in various ways so that storytelling made more sense panel to panel? Did
he rewrite character dialogue to jazz it up / make it more consistent? Did he
even go so far as to invent new plot ideas? I suppose it varied from episode to
episode, and the truth is I’m loathe to detract from either man’s work on the
strips in question, which remain fondly-remembered classics.

**OK, not the best strip, but the most obvious to illustrate my point!

***For all that I find Mazeworld, as a
whole, to lack a pleasing resolution, there’s a lot of pleasure to be had reading the strip episode by episode.

****Some artists / editorial mandates have
been stricter about depicting an ever-ageing Anderson than others. But, given her origins
as a Debbie Harry lookalike, the character has done well to stay clear of
cheesecake poses for most of her career. (Not that I’d begrudge, say, Brian
Bolland or David Roach their fondness for cheesecake.)

2 comments:

Glad you mentioned the Batman stuff. While nowt to do with 2000ad I always love the fact that in the middle of all this wonderful Tharg driven stuff he also wrote one of the defining (and my personal favourite) Batman runs ever.

Occasionally, with characters such as Scarface, you can tell it's the same guy on Batman who wrote Dredd for years and years. But the amazing thing is that most of Grant's Batman work feels really different. I'm in awe of his level of craft at writing to very different briefs.